Heartland
In The Community
Over the past 12 months, Heartland has put on a customer appreciation event with a free meal served to our community, another free meal during our indoor sale, participation in the Chevy Youth Baseball and Hockey programs donating $1000 each along with swag and gear to our local little league and hockey programs, and most notably, the first annual Prairie Harvest Fest.
Each year we do the customer appreciation event and invite the entire community, and we also do a car show each year that includes activities for kids to make it a family event. We also do coloring contests around each holiday for the kids and hold trick or treating during Halloween, which brought about 250 kids in this year. Attending all the surrounding area parades also keeps us busy almost every weekend in the summer. We also collect for Toys for Tots before Christmas and generously donate to the Christmas Wish program through a local radio station. I believe Heartland has positively impacted the diverse population of our area and also promoted the economic growth of Morris by bringing in people from all over the region, and our neighboring states. We also contribute to numerous events, clubs, organizations, and benefits throughout the year, not only in our town, but in the surrounding communities. People know they can count on Heartland for monetary or basket donations, as well as sponsorships of school athletics and functions, scoreboards, and community parks and fields.
About Prairie Harvest Fest
After some internal deliberation, Heartland announced that we would be organizing and sponsoring a new festival to follow what was previously Prairie Pioneer Days. We're calling it Prairie Harvest Fest – A Celebration of Morris. The feedback we initially got from the community was very excited, positive, and willing to help. We reached out to several businesses for sponsorships to help cover costs, the tourism board chipped in, and we spent the next several months planning and organizing. We do a car show at the dealership every year so we figured this was a good event to wrap that into as well.
After months of hard work and hours and hours of planning and getting ready, we threw an event that superseded all our expectations and hopes for our first year. People of all ages and from all over the state and Dakotas came out for an outdoor movie (which helped the movie theater profit more in a half hour than they do on a single weekend evening), games, a retail crawl, fireworks, craft vendors, a band, and our annual big car show. Food vendors were sold out by lunch, others had to get more food, the fairgrounds here in town were busy and we heard positive comments all day long. This is a 3rd generation dealership, so it felt really good to give back and do something of this scale for the community. Even months later we’re still getting thank you cards in the mail and people are still talking about it and wanting to help out next year. In 2022, Dan was awarded the Community Hero Award for this effort from the Minnesota Auto Dealer's Association. Planning for the 2023 Prairie Harvest Fest is underway and we hope to see you there!